Posted: Friday, 29 January 2010 11:03AM
How Can You Be Against A Library?
Steve Corbett Reporting
Friday, January 29, 2010
Out of breath and running with my arms loaded with books, I raced into the kitchen from school and spread my bounty on the table with the zeal of a pirate emptying sacks of sparkling loot.
The jackets of book after book glistened in the light, shining with all the colors of the rainbow in the golden brilliance of a world of words.
Although June had arrived and school was out for summer, the library remained open.
That meant I could read as much as I wanted all summer, returning to the elementary school library as often as I wished. Time and again I returned books and check out new books.
That summer was one of the best ever.
I liked fiction and had read paperback after paperback that I ordered at school during the year.
“Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine” sticks with me as a favorite. Danny eventually realized that he was his own best homework machine and that technology could never replace the human intellect.
That lesson is applicable to this day.
I read the Hardy Boys and non-fiction about “Champion Dog Prince Tom.”
But the library offered me far more than I ever imagined. Library books were not just random selections. Library books represented the educated choices of librarians, teachers and real scholars who understood that young brains were ready, willing and able to absorb history and science and literature and all the information required to help us become smart adults.
Even today, we need all the smart adults we can find.
In high school, I spent countless hours in the library, reading the works of writers who seemed to have been everywhere and done everything. But there was always more, always a new adventure and exciting stories to tell.
I discovered a world of magazines in the library, as well. Periodicals helped shape my fast-developing political consciousness. The Saturday Review appealed to me more than the Saturday Evening Post, which I also liked. Look and Life and even early Sports Illustrated opened new perspectives about people in power on the playing field and off.
I read and read and read some more, letting ideas strengthen the power of my brain.
I started to write, too.
I read “Franny and Zooey” and “Of Mice and Men.” I read about Puerto Ricans in a huge book written by a socialist. I read about Vietnam and Ireland and the moon.
By the time I was 21, I was summering from college and tending bar at Eddie’s Shamrock Bar on Kentucky Avenue in Atlantic City. Trying to save money to pay for a trip to Ireland as part of a Penn State practicum, I knew I had to watch what I spent.
So off I headed to the Atlantic City public library where I signed up for a library card and spent my off-duty time there, reading. When I left for the day or night, I lugged books back to the room where I stayed above the bar and read “Big Sur” by Jack Kerouac and “Giles Goat-Boy” by John Barth.
The money I saved went toward my trip to Ireland, the land of my grandfather’s birth – the place he left to come to America and mine coal in Scranton.
And when I got to Dublin, I hit the library there, too.
After all these years and all these books and all these idea-fueled adventures, I’m living in Scranton.
And I’m hearing that some Scranton elected officials are opposing the building of a new library in South Side.
The public officials are also against the newly established library authority that is responsible for coordinating library business for all the city’s libraries.
How can you be against a library?
Politics often interferes with progress. Fear of the unknown is often counterproductive.
Yet, the politicians who shape the Scranton City Council voting block against the new library seem to be afraid of what their political opponents might do in the future that the critics claim will cost too much tax money.
Libraries invest in ideas.
Cities and neighborhoods waste away and fade without the courageous thought that shapes leadership and tomorrow.
Please re-think any opposition to this very wise investment.
Danny Dunn would approve.
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